Currently some, health care facilities face problems associated with managing capacity and resources as well as the flow of patients through the health care facility. To complicate matters, over the next twenty years the health care system will likely be confronted with dramatically higher demand on resources and capacity. For instance, as the number of patients entering the health care system increases, the number of health care professionals, such as physicians, nurses, etc. to care for these patients will also likely increase. While the influx of patients in health care environments have not yet hit a critical mass, the impact of these increasing number of patients can be felt within health care facilities, such as hospitals, etc., today.
The capacity and resources of the health care system are affected by a number of variables. For example, baby boomers are steadily reaching an age where more intense health care is needed. There also is an increasing number of emergency room visits due to a declining percentage of the population with health care insurance and Stark law provisions which require access and treatment of patients. Additionally, less than ideal health care facility processes and procedures for ensuring an efficient process of moving patients throughout the facility during their stay as well as inefficient clinical processes for maintaining minimal variations in care between patients impacts the capacity and resources allocated within a health care system.
The above-mentioned problems oftentimes translate into a myriad of negative consequences for health care facilities. In particular, decreased profit margins typically occur as patient lengths of stay increase due to increased care demands and increased complexities in managing care. When capacity loads and patient statuses are not properly predicted, the finite health care resources may be unable to manage current needs in a timely or cost effective manner. Moreover, problems may be manifested as increased patient length of stay or inefficient transfers in level of care where patients unnecessarily spend time in a more expensive unit such as an intensive care unit (ICU) when their condition could be adequately addressed in a less expensive unit. Inefficiencies such as, for example, spending too much time in a health care unit often results in medical care that is not reimbursable by payors, such as insurance companies. Hospitals attempt to address some of the above issues, such as handling an increased influx of patients, by expanding their physical space but typically do so at a cost of about $800,000 per bed. Such costs are frequently impractical, due to the budgetary constraints of health care facilities.
Additionally, increased wait times and other delays may lead to a decrease in patient satisfaction and, in some cases, a decrease in the quality of care provided to patients. Moreover, inappropriately staffed care environments may lead to mistakes in care decisions and higher probabilities of time-dependent care not occurring in the needed window of time which could lead to the patient's health further deteriorating or even worse fatality. For instance, in an emergency room (ED) (also referred to herein as emergency department) in Los Angeles, a woman died of a perforated bowel while in a hospital waiting area. The death was attributed to a delay and breakdown in patient care. Inadequate care, while generally occurring in less dramatic examples, may occur throughout the health care system due to a number of variables such as high congestion (e.g., bottlenecks) in particular unit areas (e.g., Intensive Care Unit) and overcrowding in the health care system, etc.
Furthermore, the unpredictability and turbulence of a hospital care environment with capacity and patient flow difficulties is often detrimental to job satisfaction and retention of skilled staff such as nurses and allied care providers. Increasingly busy health care units and unpredictable patient loads often leaves health care professionals, such as for example, nurses feeling high levels of job stress and decreased abilities to control their work experience. Additionally, long wait times for medical care by patients frequently leads to overworked transport and ancillary staff, which increases employee overtime costs and as noted above may result in an unreimbursed length of stay time for many patients. These variables have been shown to decrease job satisfaction and job retention rates and may result in unsatisfied patients. Moreover, some health care facilities do not have an organized process for ensuring appropriate patient movements through the various units of the health care facility. In this regard, it may be difficult for health care facilities to understand the end-to-end patient flow throughout the enterprise and understand the causes of bottlenecks and backups in the health care system.
Some health care facilities such as hospitals use manual processes such as an all-hands bed huddle or walking the floor and physically counting available beds to garner an understanding of the health care facilities patient flow. Unfortunately, since the bed huddles and walking the floor typically occurs only sporadically, such as once a day, that information quickly becomes inaccurate as the day progresses.
Thus, a need exists to provide an efficient mechanism to predict patient load and capacity for planning and allocating resources in health care facilities and to identify areas of capacity constraints and delays in patient discharges and transfers in real-time as well as in a predictive manner and which will allow information sharing between and within health care units of a health care facility.